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The Hosting Spectrum: Which Solution Fits your Business?

Last updated on: 2016-01-15

Authored by: Rackspace Support

Choosing the right hosting
solution is a very
critical piece to your business. According to many hosting providers,
the standard way of choosing hosting is to look at the market and try to
fit your company into the model that has already been established.
However, Rackspace encourages you to look at the needs of your business
and staff and decide which hosting solution best supports what you want
to do. The diagram below is a good guide with which to start your
decision-making process. It essentially outlines the provider’s
responsibility versus the customer’s responsibility. We encourage you to
look at this diagram as an introductory piece to help you understand how
much of your company’s time and efforts will be focused on managing
servers or on driving innovators for your business.

In-House (Do-it-yourself)

The customer has complete ownership of the IT management stack. Along
with this high degree of management, the customer undertakes a high
degree of responsibility for maintaining the config 24x7x365.

Traditional Colocation

The provider offers physical space for a server on a rack. The customer
is responsible for purchasing, configuring and maintaining the physical
hardware (servers, firewalls, etc.), software and the operating system.
The responsibility is lessened due to the provider maintaining the
physical space, power, and networking, but any issues that arise outside
of the provider’s responsibilities must be resolved by the customer - day
or night. A
colocation
strategy requires that the customer select a vendor with a data center
located within a reasonable distance from the IT staff, as any issues
with devices, operating systems, application infrastructure, and
applications must be handled by the staff.

Managed Colocation

In Managed Colocation, the provider offers the datacenter space,
network, servers and other devices. The customer retains full control
and administrative responsibility over the hosting environment
(operating system and applications). This scenario creates shared
responsibility. With the hosting provider managing the hardware, network
and power, the responsibility of the operating system and application
lies with the customer’s staff. Managed
Colocation
provides the desired level of control that businesses get with
traditional colocation, but removes the day-to-day management of servers
and network devices.

Managed Hosting

In a Managed
Hosting
environment, the provider owns and is responsible for the data center,
network, device (i.e. servers, load balancers, firewalls, etc.),
virtualization, OS and application infrastructure (i.e. web servers,
application servers, database servers) of the IT infrastructure,
providing a stable operating environment for the business’s
applications. The IT staff manages the business applications and has
full control over the operating system and application infrastructure.
The customer retains control of their software and applications. Managed
Hosting provides more support compared to the previous hosting options
and allows businesses to focus fully on their core mission.

Outsource

The provider has complete ownership of the IT management stack,
including the data center, network, devices,
virtualization
software, operating systems, application infrastructure and
applications. Fully outsourced solution providers offer service level
agreements (SLAs) promising specified levels of application availability
and as a result they restrict their clients from having any
administrative access to their environment, including their application.
This means that any changes to the application infrastructure or the
application itself must be approved by the vendor and implemented
according to their timetable.